Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/402

388 The circumstance that most meteors are extinguished before reaching the earth seems to show that their mass is but small. If the distance of a meteor from the earth be ascertained, as well as its apparent brightness as compared with that of a planet, it is possible, by comparing its luminosity with that of a known quantity of ignited gas, to estimate the degree of heat evolved in the meteor's combustion. As this heat originates from the motion of the meteor being impeded or interrupted by the resistance of the air, and as this motion or momentum is exclusively dependent on the speed of the meteor as well as upon its mass, it is possible, when the rate of motion has been ascertained by direct observation, to determine the mass. Prof. Alexander Herschel has calculated by this means that those meteors of the 9th and 10th of August, 1863, which equalled the brilliancy of Venus and Jupiter, must have possessed a mass of from five to eight pounds, while those which were only as bright as stars of the second or third magnitude would not be more than about ninety grains in weight. As the greater number of meteors are less bright than stars of the second magnitude, the faint meteors must weigh only a few grains, for, according to Prof. Herschel's computation, the five meteors observed on the 12th of November, 1865, some of which surpassed in brilliancy stars of the first magnitude, had not an average weight of more than five grains.; and Schiaparelli estimated the weight of a meteor from other phenomena to be about fifteen grains. The mass, however, of the meteoric stones which fall to the earth is considerably greater, whether they consist of one single piece, such as the celebrated iron-stone discovered by Pallas in Siberia, which weighed about 2,000 pounds, or of a cloud composed of many small bodies which penetrate the earth's atmosphere in parallel paths, as shown in Fig. 1, and which, from a simultaneous ignition and descent upon the earth, present the appearance of a large meteor bursting into several smaller pieces. Such a shower of stones, accompanied by a bright light and loud explosion, occurred at L'Aigle, in Normandy, on the 26th of April, 1803, when the number of stones found in a space of 14 square miles exceeded 2,000. In the meteoric shower that fell at KúyahingaKnyahinya [sic], in Hungary, on the 9th of June, 1866, the principal stone weighed about 800 pounds, and was accompanied by about a thousand smaller stones, which were strewed over an area of 9 miles in length by 3¼ broad.

It must not be supposed, however, that the density of such a cosmical cloud is as great when out of the reach of the attraction of the sun and the earth as when its constituents fall upon the earth's surface. Schiaparelli calculates, from the number of meteors observed yearly in the month of August, that the distance between any two must amount, on the average, to 460 miles. As the cosmical clouds which produce the meteors approach the sun in their wanderings from the far-off regions of space, they increase in density some million times, therefore the distance between any two meteors, only a few grains in